Julie Ann: It’s not being lazy to sleep. It’s helping you to work harder and smarter.
JC: And it’s, it’s also a safety issue.
Julie Ann: Yeah. Lack of sleep slows down your motor skills. It slows down your problem-solving skills. It slows everything down. People really underestimate the power of sleep and how important it is to regenerate their body. How can your body recover from the day if it doesn’t have a chance to rest? It’s one of the things you can do for yourself for overall health.
Julie Ann: If you’re sleepy and you’re tired, what are the odds you’re going to eat healthy and workout? Exactly. The odds dramatically decrease because you’re tired. And it helps your emotional intelligence as well. It’s probably one of the most important things besides water. Those two things you can’t live without: sleep and water.
JC: What was the spark that got you started into fitness?
Julie Ann: I love this question because I’ve always had an obsession with nutrition and fitness. For a while, I made a lot of really unhealthy choices, and I came close to dying, so I really needed to overhaul my life at one point. I did all of what were considered the right things for my diet and for my exercise. But I still wasn’t reaching the benefits that I thought I should. Plus, I was depriving myself of so many different things. And that’s when I discovered, and this is the tagline for my show, that there’s more to health and wellness than broccoli and burpees. So, I really want people to understand that they’re an entire whole being, not just this compartmentalized person where they can take care of this part or that part and be ultimately healthy. Sometimes it is just the lack of sleep that’s going to make the difference for them to turn around absolutely everything in their life. I love to help people realize that it’s not just their diet and it’s not just exercise that’s going to make them happy and healthy. Unfortunately, a lot of people think that they have to give up everything including their happiness to be healthy where my idea is you should be happy and healthy at the same time.
Julie Ann: They go hand in hand. It shouldn’t be one or the other. In fact, it makes it so much more fun because this is your life. You should enjoy all of it as much as possible. It doesn’t have to be something you suffer through. If you’re not happy, what’s the point of having the perfect body if you’re miserable.
Julie Ann: Most people think if they lose weight, then they’re going to feel a certain way. They don’t realize that it’s kind of like a carrot on the stick. They’re still chasing that feeling that they thought losing weight would give them unless they address the underlying issue while they are losing weight. They can still be completely unhappy, and they don’t even see that thin person in the mirror they worked so hard for. They still see the overweight person. They don’t see who they really are.
JC: Can you give an example of someone, no name necessary, someone that you helped with your system to go from being afraid or being insecure or not sure about making it through and you helped them achieve their fitness goals?
Julie Ann: Let’s see here, it’s a very personal journey for each person. But I will say that typically it’s so much more fun when somebody sets a goal that’s realistic and then they blow it out of the water. I have somebody who, when they first started working out, could not lift weights, had problems with balance. And this is a young person. It wasn’t even somebody with an age issue. And she would, almost every time we would work out, she would end up hurting herself. Even though she was doing things properly, she was just extremely overweight. Now she’s running in a half marathon. And all she wanted to do was lose a little bit of weight. Now she feels confident in her body. She has changed her wellness. It it’s a part of who she is now. It’s not something she’s doing to get to a goal.
Julie Ann: So, to go from hurting herself and not moving, a couch potato, to a half marathon is pretty amazing!
JC: What are your three to five tips for that people can apply to their fitness goals?
Julie Ann: Well, surprisingly it’s number one and it seems counterintuitive, but I mentioned this before, is to schedule playtime. Schedule having fun because it’s not going to happen magically on its own. If you schedule it in, it will actually happen. Otherwise, your bucket list remains the list forever. It never actually happens.
Julie Ann: So that would be my number one. Another one is to make sure that they’re drinking water throughout the day, but here’s the thing about the water that most people don’t realize is you can drink gallons and gallons of water. But if your electrolytes are off, you are just going to excrete it out. It’s never going to actually be absorbed into your cells. You have to make sure that your electrolytes are not off. And how you do that is through taking an electrolyte tablet in the morning. Or you can add a little bit of sea salt to the water, not to the point where you taste it, but add it to the water so that your cells will actually absorb what you’re drinking. Also, through eating plenty of fruit and vegetables. That would be another one because a lot of people don’t know that.
